Page 65 of Brine and Bone
"My vicious queen," he murmured against her hair. "I'll return on the next tide."
She didn’t hear him, already lost to her dreams.
Laying her in the cradle he’d made to keep her, Nyxarion slipped out from under her.
Issuing a low hum. A summoning that danced through dark waters.
Sera materialized from the gloom. Fathomless eyes sweeping around the throne room, noting the corpse, the sleeping Siren, and her king. And then, humming, she asked, “What happened here?”
“General,” Nyxarion said, voice a low greeting, laced with droll amusement. Grinning, he said only, “Kore.”
Brows lifting, Sera’s fins flicked in surprise.
“Queen’s lightning,” he added, spined lifting with wicked, undisguised pride. “My bride has little tolerance for threats of harm to our child.”
Inclining her head, graceful even in that, Serakh absorbed it without a hint of fear. “Noted. And where are you going?”
“Business,” he said, but despite the chore ahead, his mood did not dim in the slightest. “With Asterion.” Flicking his fluke, Nyx shifted his weight and moved toward the corridor. “Post sentries at every entrance. Nothing enters this chamber, Sera. Only you. And if she wakes before I return,” he said, pausing to look back, “be with her. Do not let her be alone."
Watching him without blinking, Sera nodded. Faintly amused as she snaked through the current to guard Vorynthar’s heart from harm.
"And Sera?” he said, casting a grin over his shoulder. “When I return? It'll be with a tale of destruction that will make your cold heart sing."
And then he was gone, slipping into the endless dark.
CHAPTER 15
Sunlight sliced through the shallows in pale ribbons, and Thalos stretched. Lithe and predatory, made lazy in the sparkling warmth.
Floating on his back, arms folded behind his head as his tail traced lazy figure-eights, he drifted into a shaft of sunlight. Fins spreading to catch the heat, warming his opalescent scales until they gleamed.
Satisfied. Venom sacs emptied, and his balls…
A slow smile spread across his lips as the color of a Siren in the throes of orgasm flashed behind his eyelids.
Glorious little monster.
Yet, from below, the complaints had not stopped for the better part of a full tide.
"—an affront to biology itself. The cold alone should have killed the fetus in the first trimester." Listing, Pelagius scraped at the calcified growths edging his jaw with one claw, the sound grating through the current as he complained. "My joints ache. This water isglacial."
Thalos didn't open his eyes. "It's twenty degrees, Pelagius."
"Glacial," Pelagius repeated. "I have served Caelith Mare since the time of Jeiot Asterion, and not once have I?—"
"No one cares about your tenure, Pelagius." Vorthane's fins were pressed flat, clamped tight against his spine. "What I want to know is when we're leaving this wretched, poisoned tide."
Syrathis hung motionless several meters below, his skeletal frame barely distinguishable from the murk. Those milky amber eyes saw nothing, but the sensory barbels trailing from his jaw trembled ceaselessly, tasting every shift in temperature and salinity. "It is the child that concerns me more than the weather."
"Everythingconcerns you more than the weather," Vorthane muttered. Steel-blue scales caught a stray beam of light as the scarred male worked a cluster of sun clams free from a rocky outcrop, depositing them into the woven pouch Thalos had ordered them to fill. "You want to study it."
"Oh, yes. Quite desperately,” Syrathis said, humming a distracted agreement. Barbles growing stiff, reaching to sample some unseen current, he added, “Two venoms," in a tone that was both wheedling and pitchy. The sound grating. An irritating itch beneath the scales that refused to be scratched. “Can you imagine?”
Pelagius snorted. "I witnessed it.”
Ignoring him, Syrathis’ fins fanned along his sinuous body. “Competing strains staining a Siren’s womb?” His gillsschliicked, the academic glee left to shiver in the current. “The Pelagorn that creature carries will be… singular. A prize Caelith Maremustclaim.”
"What emerges," Vorthane corrected, "will beunprecedented. Which, I’ll grant, is far more interesting."
